


And You Waited All Alone (For Your Luck To Come Along)

by geckoholic



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 23:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19451383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/pseuds/geckoholic
Summary: Sometimes, one's whole live can change in the space of a few weeks. For Maria, apparently, that means finding out she's pregnant from her ex-boyfriend while she's starting to date her best friend.





	And You Waited All Alone (For Your Luck To Come Along)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mammothluv](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mammothluv/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: "I would love to see how their little family developed. Maria mentions Carol being there for her when no one else was. What did that look like?"
> 
> Not beta'd, so all remaining mistakes are most definitely mine.
> 
> Title is from "Friends" by Dido.

Daryl is a goddamned _shithead_. Maria bunches up the wad of gambling hall receipts she's found in his jacket, wants to spit on them too, trample them like a child during a tantrum. But one of them has to be the adult here, and although she never signed up to be his keeper, they've got a shared savings account. She has better things to do – getting his name off that account, for example, so he doesn't care her life savings to the coin machine as well. He already gambled away their rent and half their food budget for the month. 

She catches herself with the thought that at least she won't end up homeless, that she can move into her assigned quarters at base. Carol was pissed that Maria moved out, at first, but she ought to have calmed down after getting the whole quarters to herself for six months. They've fought before; so far they've always patched things up again after a while. 

Doesn't matter. Her and Daryl are over. This was the last straw. Right now she's just got to pack her things before he gets back from his latest gaming spree. She'll deal with whatever awaits at base when later. 

***

Maria feels stupid, knocking at what's technically her own door. She feels even stupider for the fact that she's done so several times for the past ten minutes and she still hasn't gotten an answer. Her things are in storage – asking her parents was embarrassing, but better than leave TV and furniture and whatever else had some value in her and Daryl's apartment and essentially write if off, even though her father lectured her the whole time – and the heavy military bag full of clothes and necessities she's got hooked over her shoulder is starting to get heavy. 

She huffs and touches the room key in her pants pocket. Carol had her chance. She'll be faced with the facts, then, once she deigns to return. Maria lets herself in and changes into something light and summery, throws on some makeup in the cramped bathroom, and goes to get drunk.

***

The watering hole closest to base is so filled with cadets that it might as well be the mess hall at base, but at least they're all in civvies, shouting and singing, chatting with each other loudly over the music. This isn't the first time Maria came here, she's not entirely antisocial, she just... most other cadets are white men, and she's been raised with a healthy mistrust of those. Her eyes roam the room and she finds a familiar face in a booth in the back, laughing with two men that could be cadets or could be locals farmers, a beer in front of her on the table, her hair done up in a loose bun. Several curls have fallen out of what's been a lazy knot in the first place. She's wearing jeans and a threadbare Rolling Stones shirt, the one with the tongue. It's too large on her frame and hangs on her askew, revealing a bare shoulder. 

Maria walks over and plops into the booth beside her, reaches for her beer, and takes a gulp. Carol stares at her a moment, dumbfounded, then throws her head back on a laugh and motions for the glass back. 

“Nice of you to join us for once,” she shouts over the music. 

Maria flips her the bird and takes another swig before she hands the glass over. She grins. Carol grins back. 

***

She doesn't tell Carol about Daryl and moving back to base yet. It'd sour the mood, and Maria had her share of maudlin thoughts the last little while. Not tonight. They're here to have fun tonight, and the rest of the world stays outside the bar. 

Before long they're moving to whiskey and shots instead of beer. Maria's vision pleasantly blurs at the edges. She watches Carol dance out of tune, slow to rock songs, fast to ballads. Her body curves and sways in ways that Maria never noticed until today – or maybe she never paid attention. Carol used to be a steadfast part of her life ever since they were teenagers. Until their big fight about Daryl and moving out, they've never been apart for more than a week. 

She has, however, always known that Carol's beautiful. 

Their eyes meet and Carol holds Maria's eyes as she keeps dancing with the men near the bar. Maria's neck prickles with shock, with excitement. They've never been... this, but the thought isn't at all foreign. 

When the music changes, Carol snaps her fingers for the barkeeper's attention, and her eyes only leave Maria's for the time it takes to order them each another round of whiskey. She saunters back towards their table with a glass in each hand. Some of the amber liquid sloshes over as she puts them on the table. 

The Cure is playing in the background. Carol laughs. It's been months, almost a year, since Maria has heard the sound of her laughter, and tonight, she likes it more and more each time. 

She leans over and kisses her. 

***

Maria's head throbs painfully. The previous night is a blur. Recognizing her surroundings takes her a few seconds; she's not in her apartment. She's in her quarters at the base. The quarters she shares with... 

Oh, crap. 

She glances at the other bed. The sheets are barely covering Carol's naked body; it look like she's kicked them off during the night because of the stuffy heat in the barracks. Maria takes a peek underneath her own sheets, and yup, she finds her suspicions confirmed. 

So apparently she celebrated moving back into the barracks with her best friends since high school with a drunken fuck. Great. That won't complicate anything at all. Maria rubs her eyes and wraps the sheets around her shoulders. She pads into the bathroom and stares into the mirror and then curses under her breath. 

She hasn't even unpacked her toothbrush yet. 

***

“So,” says Carol upon Maria's return to the bedroom. She woke up in the meantime – obviously – and she's sitting up on the bed. Maria tries hard to keep her gaze of Carol's bare breasts and the ignore the slivers of memory that her brain throws at her; twisting a nipple between two fingers while her tongue caresses the other, that kind of thing. 

She shakes the images out of her head, the sounds, the way Carol's skin felt under her touch. “So,” she parrots, even though she's way too hungover for this conversation. 

“I've never thought of you like...” Carol flaps a hand between them, and Maria feels nauseous all of the sudden at the fear that this is the start to a lets-forget-this-ever-happened speech. She's freaked out by how much the idea freaks her out. Carol clears her throat and continues. “Until last night, you were, just. _Maria._ ” 

And Maria nods, because yes. She understands. She feels the same, and some of the tension flows out of her as suddenly as it rose. “Me neither. I didn't know that I wanted this.” 

“Yes!” Carol agrees, nodding with enthusiasm, and it makes her breasts jiggle a little. There's a clear bite mark on her left collarbone, too, and Maria doesn't recall putting it there, but is rather certain that's exactly what she did. She quickly looks back up to meet Carol's eyes. “And I want it. Fuck, I really want it. I want to do it again, see where it leads us.”

It's a monumentally stupid idea. They've known each other for such a long time, they've been constants in each other's lives, and that's a lot to risk for a rebound or an illicit affair. 

On the other hand, they've already done it once. Cat's out of the bag, anyway. 

Maria nods again, with feeling this time. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, let's give it a try.”

***

The nausea starts creeping in about three or four weeks after she kicked Daryl out of her life and moved back into base, after she first fucked Carol, after... everything. And at first she blames it on getting fed up with the mess hall food, on all the recent changes in her life, on stress and heartache taking its toll. 

She never reacted badly to the mess hall food, had never been a picky eater. She doesn't throw up easily, not even when drunk or ill. She knows there most be more to it than that, but she keeps pushing the knowledge away. 

Her bullheadedness finally reaches its limit when she has to excuse herself from a flight exercise, has to run the gauntlet – literally _run_ – through the other cadets, under Carol's worried gaze, to make it to the bathroom again. Maria throws up again and sits back against the cold tiles, doing the math. 

She had her last period... oh hell, too long ago. 

***

The two blue lines in the small display window of the gas station quick test she picks up the following evening won't go away, no matter for how long Maria will stare at them, trying to will them away. She covers her mouth with her hand, muffling a sob. She's pregnant. 

She's living at the base. She's casually fucking her best friend and hasn't even gotten around to have a talk with her about where that might go in the long run. She's not even halfway through the program she worked her ass off to get in. And she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend who's in the process of gambling away every penny he owns. 

Maria wants to laugh, but what comes out is another sob. She wants to call her mother. She knows what her father will say. What she doesn't know is if she'll want to obey him – get rid of it, put the family planning off until she has a good husband and a career that will let her step back for a few months. And she understands, she does – the many lives of too many women in her family were ruined by having children at the wrong time, with the wrong men. 

She puts her hand onto her belly. It'll be weeks before she'll show even a slight bump, and yet, it's as if she can already feel the new life growing underneath her palm. Right then and there, she makes a decision. This is her life, and it's her baby. Daryl doesn't matter. Her family doesn't matter. 

This is _her child_ and she'll love it with her whole heart. 

*** 

Her father surprises her, but not for the better. Maria had hoped for... oh, something. No happy excitement, sure, but respect for her choice. On her way out, her mother slipped her two hundred-dollar-notes, but she rather expects that's the extent of help from her family. 

She hasn't told Daryl yet. Maybe she won't, at least until he's got his life back on track. 

Carol sits on her bed, opposite from Maria, and listens. She takes the little journal Maria got from her ob-gyn, and flips through the pages, for now still empty except for Maria's name and data. She nods in sympathy when Maria tells her about the visit to her parents; she's known the Rambeau family long enough to read between the lines. 

Eventually, Maria falls silent. Carol inches forward a little and takes Maria's hand, laces their fingers together. “Fuck them.”

Maria laughs, a dry sound. “Yeah, sure. I can do this on my own, right? I've got this, even if I'm alone? Is that what you were gonna say?” 

Carol shakes her head, expression serious, but also wearing the hint of a smile. “Who says you're alone?”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [dreamwidth](https://geckoholic.dreamwidth.org/), [tumblr](http://lostemotion.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/spacenerdz).


End file.
